Shopping Carts: Advantages & Differences

Advantages and Differences of the Miva Merchant Shopping Cart in Comparison to Open Source Carts.

When building an ecommerce website, it is crucial to have cart software that fits the needs of your business. It does not matter how great your product is, if the customer cannot navigate your website’s cart software or does not think it looks professional. This will undermine your credibility and you stand the risk of losing a substantial number of sales. In addition to the importance of the customer interface, cart software has a big impact on the administrator end as well. A choice needs to be made regarding how much time you want to spend building and maintaining the cart software on your website. With several web hosted cart software options from which to choose, how do you make that choice?

The first step in picking cart software is to know your options. There are two types of software: commercial and open source. Open source software means that the coding is open for the user to edit. Open source software is free and allows for maximum cart optimization with the user being able to rework the code to fit his or her exact needs. However, while this software can be very powerful, the catch is that the user must have considerable knowledge of programming and web coding in order to take advantage of this ability. For someone who is only somewhat familiar with coding, there is a huge learning curve here. If you are inexperienced, open source software such as OSCommerce, ZenCart and Magento can severely affect your timeline of getting the software up and running for your customers.

Commercial shopping cart software requires purchase or a monthly fee, but is perfect for those who do not have a lot of programming experience or who need a shopping cart option that is comprehensive, simple and provides an easy to navigate user interface. When investigating commercial cart software, take a look at Miva Merchant. Miva requires a monthly fee, but it provides engaging templates that customers will enjoy and takes the programming burden off the administrator. In order to compare open source and commercial software, lets compare OSCommerce and Miva Merchant.

• OSCommerce is search engine friendly for the most part. SEO features include being able to modify the title, meta tags, URLs and other components. However, building this search engine friendly software takes a lot of knowledge. Miva comes with SEO features already in place.

• Basic OSCommerce software is not optimized, so you have to do this yourself. Miva Merchant is ready to use as soon as it is purchased. Plus, you can pay Miva programming professionals to modify the templates to ensure that you get the exact cart software you want. While OSCommerce and other open source options have a range of customization possibilities, if you do not have the knowledge to take advantage of it, Miva would be a better fit. In addition, you can try your hand at customization with Miva Merchant even if you are inexperienced. Miva offers three excellent features to help you: video training, telephone customer support and an active online community forum where you can post questions about the software.
• Some companies do offer OSCommerce add-ons for purchase that assist with some of the software’s programming-heavy components, but these also come with their own advantages and limitations. With Miva’s already established software, you do not have to worry about buying additional products.

OSCommerce is not the only open source software that can be used in this comparison.

ZenCart, while it has many of the contributions from OSCommerce already installed with a nice variety of features, has a messy administrator interface in some areas. Magento is also very heavy on the programming end.

The other thing to be aware of with open source software is that it is up to the users to modify the code, which is the nature of this type of software. However, what that also means is that these software options may take longer to produce newer and better versions, and they may not offer great support resources. Commercial software companies like Miva Merchant continually work on better and more user-friendly versions for both you and the customer.

Contributing author:   Daniel Thompson, WebHostingSearch